Even if you have just two websites running WordPress, you will find yourself doing repetitive tasks that really should be much easier, so in this post I am going to take a look at MainWP in action. MainWP is one of a small group of remote management systems for WordPress. The others (that I know of) are iControlWP, InfiniteWP, ManageWP, WP Central Hub, WP Remote, CMS Commander, iThemesSync and WPDash. Quite a lot to choose from. The last one, WPDash is still in beta. Based on the number of ‘active installs’ (as per the WordPress.org website) of the client plugins (most of these management tools have at least the child or client plugin on the WordPress.org free plugins repository), the top three are:

InfiniteWP (300,000+ active installs). The best deal here is the $399 for all 19 addons, but this is a one year license for updates, new addons and support. From what I can see, the subsequent years would cost half of this, $199 per year.

ManageWP (200,000+ active installs). The most functional package would cost $239 per annum for 5 sites, but this cost is annual, the more sites you have the more it costs, and it offers far less functionality than other offerings.

MainWP (90,000+ active installs). ‘The Bundle’ deal is for (currently) 24 premium extensions (the free version includes 5 more extensions) that costs $399. Not per year. This is a lifetime deal. Lifetime support, lifetime upgrades and lifetime access to new extensions. The current version is v2, and it has only been available for 3 months. It is likely that within a year it will be up there with InfiniteWP on active sites in use.

If you don’t want to serve visitors to your site the standard WordPress 404 page, this is how to customize what they see using settings in Ultimatum Theme. With this framework, there is no ‘themed’ 404 page, instead you are expected to make your own, and you should. So, what is a 404 page? Well, a user requests a page from your website but your database cannot find it and so WordPress shows this error message page.

For some time this website has been styled using the Bootstrap framework, and I have been meaning to investigate how to make a Bootstrap Float to Top Button. It should be quite easy; a simple snippet of javascript and a small amount of CSS. You will need to make a javascript file (I called mine bs-back-to-top.js) containing this code:

Note that this uses Font Awesome for the icon on the button, so you will need to have Font Awesome already loading to your site pages. To get WordPress to call this javascript file, you are going to have to roll your sleeves up and do a bit of coding. For beginners this will be hard. If you know WordPress at all, you will not be using a theme directly, but instead you will be using a child theme. This is especially so if you are using a theme framework, such as the one I use; Ultimatum Theme. Assuming that you already have a child theme, it will have a file called functions.php in the theme folder. Into that you will need a few lines of script like this:(more…)

This thorny topic has bugged me for some time, ‘How to make a sticky footer with Ultimatum Theme?’ I thought that I had an answer, but, after a few days of lengthy Skype conversations with Emmanuel ARNOUD (a fellow user of Ultimatum Theme framework), I realized a completely new approach was needed. Most CSS/HTML solutions rely on certain HTML elements on the page and for the footer to be a fixed height. But we know that the footer often has quite a bit of content, meaning that its height will vary. The only solution is to use javascript, and, in particular, jQuery. So, before going any further, make sure you have jQuery loading in WordPress. I am sorry to say that you are going to have to roll your sleeves up and do a bit of coding. For beginners this will be hard. If you know WordPress at all, you will not be using a theme directly, but instead you will be using a child theme. This is especially so if you are using a theme framework, such as the one I use; Ultimatum Theme. Assuming that you already have a custom stylesheet for your child theme (mine is called custom-style.css and sits in a css folder insider the child theme folder, and is already enqueued, see this post for more details on a custom css file and the functions.php file), this is the new css to add to it:

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.footwrapper{width:100%;}

.footwrapper {width: 100%;}

Note so hard, so far. By the way, if you have either html or body set to 100% height in css, you will need to remove this ‘height:100%’ css rule. Next, if you do not have one already, you need a javascript folder inside your child theme folder on your server. It is normal to name this folder ‘js’. Inside that folder, make a text file called ‘wp-sticky-footer.js’. You can copy and paste the code from below into that file, and save it:

Because it is so popular, WordPress is probably the most targeted web application for hackers to attack. This post is intended to provide some basic steps that you can take to protect your site. Let’s step through all the things you should do or be aware of.

Hiding WordPress

By default, WordPress has ‘standard’ folder and file naming, making it really easy to spot that your site is using WordPress. Hide My WP changes these. Unfortunately, not all plugins follow the ‘WordPress rules’ when naming things, and so Hide My WP might break parts of your site, and for this it has some pre-built compatibility modes that you can import. The more plugins that you have, the more likely it will be that you will need to use one of these compatibility modes. Fortunately, plugin writers frequently update their plugins, and I have seen quite a few that have been re-written to avoid this issue. You can only purchase Hide My WP from CodeCanyon, but the cost, at US$22 is very reasonable.

Following on from the previous blog post on breadcrumbs, this is Ultimatum Theme for your Self-Hosted WordPress Site – Part 6 – Bootstrap Breadcrumbs. In the previous post we set up Yoast SEO Breadcrumbs and got them to look like the Bootswatch 3. One advantage of the Yoast Breadcrumbs not covered in the previous post was that it attaches rdf microdata tags you the breadcrumbs, meaning Google is happy. The exemplar pages offered by Bootswatch include no such microdata tags, and may indeed not be ideal for that purpose. Now I will take the final step and make Yoast Breadcrumbs output in Bootswatch html. We are going to need to edit two files on our web server; custom-style.css and functions.php. We will also need to modify some settings in your admin pages. Let’s edit functions.php first.

As before, as I showed in this post, you will find functions.php in the child theme folder on your web server. Edit the copy of functions.php that you should have on your local PC by opening it in whichever editor you prefer to use. So, add a few lines of code at the end, namely this: (more…)